Murdoch: Journalism's Mubarak

The winds of democracy are blowing, picking up the detritus around the world and sending it scudding. We saw it in Tunisia, Yemen and Egypt, and there are strong gusts in Syria and Libya. But who would have thought that these same winds might also be blowing away Rupert Murdoch — the colossus of journalism who has helped change the outcome of elections, made presidents and prime ministers quake in fear, rewritten facts to his convenience and unleashed the forces of angry, right-wing populist excess until they seemed to intimidate the entire U.S. media?

Murdoch liked to brag that he was challenging elitist liberal culture by giving a voice to people who were marginalized. But that’s the trouble with releasing the populist Kraken. You think you can control it — and then it turns on you.

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Murdoch knew there were lots of people who love to be riled and titillated. He didn’t reckon that they might not like being abused and would even rise in fury when they found out.

If this sounds familiar, it should. Murdoch is really just another dictator whose grip is threatened by democratic effusions. Most people realized that Murdoch was something of a conniver, that he was a bully, that his media empire was designed in the most self-serving ways. Still, that was no less true of James Gordon Bennett, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, Murdoch’s journalistic forebears.

But the telephone hacking scandal in Great Britain and the other attendant revelations reveal that Murdoch was something more than a garden variety journalistic despot. He appears to have been a journalistic terrorist as well, a journalistic KGB, a journalistic mobster whose minions used blackmail — overall, a journalistic thug.

It is not only the hacking of the phone of a missing girl, and the deletion of some messages that appalls; or the threats against officers investigating the hacking; or the use of privileged police information to track down celebrities. It is the acquisition and leaking of information that then-Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown’s newborn infant had cystic fibrosis – information that the Browns did not want made public. This goes beyond overzealous tabloid impropriety. It breaks the bounds of human decency.

Until now, nothing seemed to affect Murdoch. As long as the public saw only his power and not his depredations, he was unassailable — especially since his power was said to be exercised in the name of ordinary folks. He was not only the Fourth Estate; he was bigger than the other three estates combined — even if his depredations contributed to that power.

But we have seen that the bigger they are, the harder they fall. If Murdoch was one of the world’s biggest power brokers before the scandal, after it broke, he has become journalism’s Mubarak, its El Abidine Ben Ali, its Ali Abdullah Saleh – the recently toppled strongmen in Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen.